Chapter 9 Adam
ADAM
The driver is going too slow.
Every red light feels like a personal assault, every other car on the road an obstacle placed there specifically to keep me from getting home before Daisy does.
My hands won't stop shaking. I've tried gripping them together, pressing them flat against my thighs, shoving them into my pockets, nothing works.
They just keep trembling like they belong to someone else, someone who's just realized he's made the worst mistake of his life.
"Can you go faster?"
"I'm doing the limit, sir."
"I'll pay the ticket. Whatever it costs. Just go faster."
The driver glances at me in the rearview mirror, and I must look as wrecked as I feel because he doesn't argue.
The car accelerates, weaving through traffic with a recklessness that would normally make me reach for my seatbelt and calculate accident probabilities.
I don't care about accident probabilities right now.
I care about the look on Daisy's face when she stood up from that table. I care about the way her voice cracked when she said she fell in love with me anyway.
I fell in love with the man who asked permission to kiss me.
She loved me.
The car pulls into the garage and I'm out before it fully stops, ignoring the driver's startled "Sir?
" as I sprint toward the elevator. The ride up takes forever.
Thirty-seven floors of staring at my reflection in the polished doors and seeing a man I don't recognize, someone whose priorities got so twisted he forgot what mattered.
The penthouse doors open. Daisy is in the hallway with two suitcases.
She's still wearing the dress from dinner, the emerald one Lorraine picked out, but she's kicked off her heels and her hair is coming loose from whatever elaborate arrangement the stylist created.
She's pulling the larger suitcase toward the elevator, her back to me, and she doesn't turn around when I step out.
"Don't." The word comes out raw, desperate. "Daisy, don't leave."
She stops walking but doesn't face me. "I'm not doing this right now, Adam."
"Please. Just… please look at me."
Slowly, she turns. Her eyes are dry. Instead she looks tired. Resigned.
"What do you want me to say?" she asks. "That it's fine? That I'll come back inside and we can pretend tonight didn't happen?"
"No. I want—" I don't know what I want. I don't know how to fix this. "I want to explain."
"Explain what? The press release with my fake quote? The divorce announcement dated three weeks from now?" She laughs, but there's no humor in it. "Or maybe you want to explain how you told your father you're not sure you love me while I was upstairs trying to figure out how to save our marriage?"
The words knock the air clean out of me. "You heard that."
"I heard everything. The stupid romance books. The part where what I think doesn't matter." She crosses her arms over her chest. "I heard you agree with him, Adam. I heard you say he was right."
"I was wrong." I take a step toward her, and she takes a step back, maintaining the distance between us.
"I was so wrong, Daisy. About everything.
I let Lorraine prepare that release, I let my father convince me that exit planning was just good strategy, and I never…
I should have talked to you. I should have asked what you wanted instead of deciding for both of us. "
"Yes. You should have."
"I know. I know that now."
"Now." She shakes her head. "You know it now, when I'm standing in the hallway with suitcases. Not last month when you started the exit prep. Not last week when you were too busy for dinner. Not two hours ago when you gave a toast about partnership while knowing you were planning to end it."
"The toast was Lorraine's script—"
"Everything is Lorraine's script!" Her voice rises for the first time, cracking at the edges.
"Our first meeting story, our anniversary posts, your speeches about what a wonderful wife I am, all of it scripted, all of it managed, and I bought it anyway.
I thought if I just loved you enough, eventually some of it would be real. "
"It was real." I'm begging now, and I don't care how it sounds. "The threshold was real. The window seat during the snowstorm. The night I asked to kiss you. That wasn't a script, Daisy. That was me."
"And the press release? The fake quote you put in my mouth without asking? Was that you too?"
I can't deny it. I can't explain it away or spin it into an excuse. "I signed off on it. I let it happen. I told myself it was just preparation, just contingency planning, but I knew what it meant and I did it anyway."
"Why?"
The truth is ugly and complicated: fear, cowardice, the way my father's voice has been in my head since I was fourteen telling me that sentiment is weakness and love is leverage.
None of that excuses what I did. None of it explains why I let Lorraine draft an ending to my marriage while my wife was upstairs building a life I was too distracted to notice.
"Because I was scared," I finally say. "Because you were starting to matter in ways I didn't know how to handle, and instead of figuring it out, I let my father convince me that having an exit strategy was smart business. I was a coward, and you deserved better."
"I believe you were scared," she says quietly.
"I believe you didn't know how to handle it.
But Adam, you had five years to figure it out.
Five years to talk to me, to let me in, to be my partner instead of my investor.
And you spent all of them keeping me at arm's length while I fell in love with someone who wasn't really there. "
"I'm here now."
"You're here because I'm leaving. You're here because I embarrassed you in front of Klaus and the whole room, and now the narrative is out of control and you need to manage it." She picks up the handle of her suitcase again. "That's not the same as being here for me."
"I'll fix it." The words come out desperate, grasping. "Tell me what to fix. I'll do anything, Daisy. I'll fire Lorraine, I'll tell Klaus the truth myself, I'll—"
"You can't fix it in one night." Her voice is gentle now, almost kind, and that's worse than anger.
"You didn't build this in one night, Adam.
You built it over five years of choosing everything else over me.
The company, your father, the deals and the dinners and the quarterly reports, all of it came first, and I got whatever was left over. Which was usually nothing."
"That's not—"
"It is. It's exactly what happened, and we both know it." She reaches up and touches her left hand, and I realize with a jolt that she's sliding off her wedding ring. "I can't keep waiting for you to show up. I've been waiting for five years, and I'm tired."
She holds the ring out to me. I don't take it.
"Please." My voice breaks on the word. "Daisy, please don't do this."
"I'm not doing anything to you." She sets the ring on the hall table, next to a vase of flowers that someone (Lorraine, probably) arranged for aesthetic purposes. "I'm doing something for me. For the first time in five years, I'm choosing myself instead of this marriage."
The elevator arrives. She steps inside, pulling both suitcases with her, and I stand frozen in the hallway.
"I loved you," she says as the doors start to close. "I really did. I just couldn't keep loving someone who wasn't sure he loved me back."
The doors close. The light above them starts descending (37, 36, 35) and I watch it go because I can't look away. I love her. The elevator light reaches the lobby and stops. She's gone. I make it to the reading room before my legs give out.
My phone is in my hand before I realize I've pulled it out. I scroll through contacts, looking for someone who might understand, and land on a name I haven't called in months. Grayson picks up on the second ring.
"Adam. It's almost midnight, what's—"
"She left." My voice sounds strange, hollow. "Grayson, she left me. What did you do when Abbie left? What did you do?"
There's a pause. I can hear him moving, a door closing, the muffled sound of him settling somewhere private.
"Oh, boy," he says finally. "Take a seat. This is going to be a long conversation."
"I don't care how long it is." I slide down the wall until I'm sitting on the floor, back against the shelves full of books I never read. "Tell me. Please."
"Okay." Grayson's voice shifts, becoming serious in a way I rarely hear from him. "First question: do you actually love her, or do you just not want to lose?"
"I love her." The words come out without hesitation. "I know I do. I've known for… I think I've known for years, and I was too scared to admit it, and now she's gone and I don't know how to—"
"Slow down. Breathe." He waits until he hears me take a breath. "Second question: what did you do? Not the surface stuff: the real thing. The thing that made her leave tonight instead of any other night."
The silence on the other end of the line stretches long enough that I check to make sure the call didn't drop.
"Start from the beginning," Grayson finally says. "And I mean the beginning. Not the dinner party."
"The press release." I close my eyes, leaning back against the reading-room shelves. "Lorraine drafted a statement about the separation. A separation announcement dated three weeks from tonight."
"And?"
"And there was a quote. Attributed to Daisy." My throat tightens around the words. "Wishing me the best in my future endeavors. Very civilized. Very mutual."
"Did Daisy write that quote?"
"No." The word is out before he finishes asking.
"Did Daisy approve that quote?"
"No. She never saw it."
"Did you ask Daisy about the quote?"
"I—" I stop. Start again. "I signed off on it. My signature. My approval. A fake quote about my wife that I never even showed her."
"Adam."
"I know."
"You put words in her mouth. In a press release. To the entire—"
"I know, Gray."
"Do you? Because I'm not sure you do." His voice goes hard in that way it only does when he's genuinely angry. "You let your PR team fabricate a statement from your wife, and you signed your name to it like it was a quarterly earnings report."
"It wasn't… I didn't think of it as fabricating—"
"What would you call it?"
I don't have an answer. I had one, an hour ago. A line about protecting her from the media, controlling the narrative, managing the situation. It sounded reasonable in my head. It sounds monstrous now.
"Jesus," Grayson says into the silence. "You really went for the full catastrophe, didn't you?"
"I didn't mean—"
"I know you didn't mean to. That's almost worse." He sighs. "The point is, you can't talk your way out of this. Words are what got you here. She's heard enough words from you to know they don't mean anything unless they come with action."
"So what do I do?"
"First, you give her space. Not forever, maybe a couple weeks.
Let her breathe, let her process, let her remember that she has a life outside of you and your mess.
" He pauses. "Then you go to her people.
Not her. Her people. The friends, the family, whoever she trusts.
You humble yourself in front of them and you prove you're serious. "
"And if they don't believe me?"
"Then you keep proving it until they do. This isn't a negotiation, Adam. You don't get to set the terms. She does. Your only job is to show up and be ready to look like an idiot, because that's the entry fee for earning back someone you've hurt."
I let that sink in. The reading room is dark around me, moonlight coming through the windows I had installed so Daisy could read by natural light. She used them without me. I never made time to read here with her.
"I was so focused on building things," I say quietly. "The company, the portfolio, this whole life that looked impressive. I forgot to build the one thing that actually mattered."
"Yeah, well. Welcome to the club." Grayson's voice is dry but not unkind. "We meet Thursdays. Bring your own humility."
"What if it's too late?"
"It might be. That's the risk you take when you hurt someone you love. They get to decide if you've done too much damage. But if there's any chance, any possibility at all, you owe it to both of you to try."
I stare at the bookshelves, filled with novels Daisy recommended that I never read. Romance novels, mostly. The kind with happy endings and heroes who show up and grand gestures that actually matter.
"I'm not letting her go," I say, and the words feel like a decision, like a line drawn in the dark. "I know I might fail. I know she might never forgive me. But I'm not going to let her think I didn't fight for her."
"Good." Grayson sounds almost proud. "That's the first step. Now, you got a pen? Because I'm about to give you the playbook, and you're going to want to take notes."
I reach for the pen on the side table (Daisy's, probably, left here for margin notes I never bothered to read) and I start writing.